Conversation with an affiliate with 9 months of experience and stuck

Published May 30, 2013

I get hit up a lot during the day by people that are having some challenges in their direct marketing business.

Typically the problems are the same. Trying lots of traffic sources and lots of offers. Bouncing around a lot and not really pushing through to learn through trial and error. A lot of people see this business like gambling where they go from slot machine to slot machine putting in some money and crossing their fingers.

Marketing is a learned skill and all learning is first information gathering and then doing it. But doing it doesn’t mean try 50 things and say you’re not good when you don’t hit the jackpot.

Doing it means picking 1 thing to do and going through the trial and error of learning to make that 1 thing work. Through this trial and error repetition is where the real learning happens.

The conversation below is one I have a lot of times. If you’re new to the direct marketing business read this post and build a plan around it.

If you’re old in the business and stuck, read this post and get back to basics.

[2:09:09 AM] Affiliate: Hi Jason, really sorry to bother you, I am a STM (stackthatmoney) member and saw your skype contact details there. I know you are a very busy guy, but can you please add me to your contact list so I can ask you some quick questions when ur free?
[9:36:22 AM] Jason Akatiff: Jason Akatiff has shared contact details with Affiliate.
[9:36:28 AM] Jason Akatiff: Happy to help
[9:36:31 AM] Jason Akatiff: what can I do for you?
[9:39:08 AM] Affiliate: thanks very much jason, i been doing AM for over 9 months and I am not really making a good progress, I was just wondering if you can point me to the right direction please?
[9:40:11 AM] Jason Akatiff: certainly tell me your story
[9:43:47 AM] Affiliate: so i have been running all sort of offers with intext ads and PPV, right now I am making a small profit with intext and break even with PPV (pay per view). My approach really sucks I am just throwing campaigns up from different verticals and seeing what sticks. I see on the STM (stackthatmoney) forum, you talked a lot about sticking with just one traffic source and vertical, so which vertical and traffic source would you suggest me to focus on for now.
[9:44:28 AM] Jason Akatiff: which do you believe in or know a lot about?
[9:45:26 AM] Affiliate: I would say I probably know intext ads a bit more since I am actually making money there, I dont really have a favourite vertical
[9:45:43 AM] Jason Akatiff: ok well intext is general
[9:45:53 AM] Jason Akatiff: what specific source and what strategy are you using?
[9:45:58 AM] Jason Akatiff: what’s your goal with this business?
[9:48:00 AM] Affiliate: I am using 50onred, my strategy is mainly to find offers that have good alexa ranking, and then I will find keywords that are closely related to the offer I am promoting, usually around 100 to 200 keywords at a time
[9:48:19 AM] Affiliate: I don’t really use landing pages, just DL ( direct link)
[9:48:28 AM] Jason Akatiff: I see
[9:48:55 AM] Jason Akatiff: so I think what is important here is what is your outcome for being in this business?
[9:48:58 AM] Jason Akatiff: how much do you want to make?
[9:49:03 AM] Jason Akatiff: why do you want to make that?
[9:52:09 AM] Affiliate: my goal is to make $1000 a day on average at some point, I want to do that so I can make my parents proud really. I live in the uk atm with my gf, and my parents are in Hong Kong, If I make this kind of money I can go over and see them more often
[9:52:49 AM] Jason Akatiff: ok 1k/day seems very doable
[9:52:59 AM] Jason Akatiff: this is important because you need to see what you’re promoting
[9:53:08 AM] Jason Akatiff: and where you’re buying traffic
[9:53:13 AM] Jason Akatiff: it’s very hard to do 1k/day on say POF (plentyoffish)
[9:53:16 AM] Jason Akatiff: but much easier on FB (facebook)
[9:53:36 AM] Jason Akatiff: just due to there being a lot more ad inventory available on FB
[9:53:53 AM] Affiliate: understood.
[9:53:57 AM] Jason Akatiff: 50onRed has good inventory
[9:53:57 AM] Jason Akatiff: but
[9:54:15 AM] Jason Akatiff: but if you want volume I think you have to go the other direction from how you’re currently thinking
[9:54:34 AM] Jason Akatiff: if you’re going to do in-text you would want to think; ok what’s some super high volume keywords
[9:54:47 AM] Jason Akatiff: cause those keywords have scale
[9:55:17 AM] Jason Akatiff: if you have low volume targeted keywords you’ll get good ROI but very little volume and make 20-100$/day
[9:55:21 AM] Jason Akatiff: unless you do it in massive scale
[9:55:43 AM] Jason Akatiff: I typically like to think where’s there a ton of ad inventory “first”
[9:55:52 AM] Jason Akatiff: then figure out what to put in front of it to sell
[9:57:10 AM] Affiliate: ok, I will try and ask my rep on 50onred to see if he can give me a list of high volume keywords.
[9:57:26 AM] Jason Akatiff: 🙂
[9:58:11 AM] Affiliate: so when running these sorts of campaigns, i assume I will have to rotate a lot of offers?
[9:59:15 AM] Jason Akatiff: nope
[9:59:24 AM] Jason Akatiff: you have to pick high volume traffic
[9:59:44 AM] Jason Akatiff: then look through all the offers and decide how you could write copy to get those people interested in the product
[9:59:49 AM] Jason Akatiff: basically bridge between the two
[10:01:24 AM] Affiliate: ok, make sense, I m not very good at copywriting but I am reading the books u suggested on the forum.
[10:01:36 AM] Jason Akatiff: Cashvertising?
[10:01:39 AM] Affiliate: yes
[10:01:43 AM] Jason Akatiff: can always hire a copywriter as well
[10:01:55 AM] Jason Akatiff: that’s a big part of this business is knowing how to write copy
[10:02:01 AM] Jason Akatiff: so I’d focus on building that muscle
[10:02:30 AM] Jason Akatiff: most people I find that do well at this business are good at writing copy or technically good
[10:03:11 AM] Affiliate: ok i will def work on that, can you suggest how many copys i should write a day for each campaign?
[10:04:28 AM] Affiliate: and shall I set myself to launch a set number of campaigns daily? or concentrating one at a time?
[10:05:40 AM] Jason Akatiff: 1 traffic source, 1 offer
[10:05:52 AM] Jason Akatiff: choose wisely 😀
[10:07:32 AM] Affiliate: haha, so at what point I need to decide the offer is not working? like after how many clicks or how much money is spent etc?
[10:08:31 AM] Jason Akatiff: depends on the offer
[10:08:42 AM] Jason Akatiff: depending on the offer
[10:08:59 AM] Jason Akatiff: how much it pays and how well it “should” convert
[10:09:19 AM] Jason Akatiff: short form leadgen you should have some leads after 200-500 clicks
[10:09:31 AM] Jason Akatiff: if you have 0 leads then I’d probably move on
[10:09:34 AM] Jason Akatiff: if you have some leads
[10:09:52 AM] Jason Akatiff: if you’re around 50% loss
[10:09:55 AM] Jason Akatiff: that’s good to start
[10:10:02 AM] Jason Akatiff: anything better then that is great
[10:12:04 AM] Affiliate: ok got it, so at that point, I would want to split test ad copys/ images and between LPs (landing pages) and DL (direct link) to try and improve the ROI i assume?
[10:12:54 AM] Jason Akatiff: yep
[10:13:07 AM] Jason Akatiff: before starting do you math
[10:13:59 AM] Affiliate: ok, I read ur blog post about the math, I will make sure to go through it again.
[10:14:25 AM] Jason Akatiff: 🙂
[10:14:41 AM] Affiliate: thanks very much for taking the time to help me Jason, I really appreciate it 🙂
[10:15:47 AM] Jason Akatiff: no problem hope you do great 😀

One Comment

Great post! Before joining STM I was dreaming about $100/day but now I do some money but stuck as well…
Need to change my methods asap because there is really no sense to optimize a campaign if you can’t scale it later.